Hundreds, if not thousands, of articles have been written describing how poorly Windows Vista fits in the enterprise space. After Forrester recently reported that Vista's business penetration is still in the single digits at 9%, we can officially call Windows Vista an utter failure in business. Of course, the same report also indicates that 2009 will see Vista business penetration surpassing 30% as sales of the operating system surge; that outlook seems a bit optimistic. Currently, 81% of businesses use either Windows 2000 or Windows XP as their operating system of choice. Remember, Vista first become generally available in late 2006, so we're looking at more than two years for organizations to consider their Vista plans and we're still seeing single digits.
I'm the furthest things you'll find from a Microsoft-hater. In fact, I generally like their products and deploy a lot of solutions at Westminster College based on the company's products. I've spent a whole lot of time thinking about the Vista issue and, like many other IT leaders, have come to the conclusion that Westminster will not be undertaking a general deployment of Windows Vista. We currently support mostly Windows XP, with a very few Vista-based laptops in the mix. We also support Mac OS X. We do not provide nor do we support Linux on the desktop.
For transparency's sake, I want to say the following: For my personal use, I actually run Windows Server 2008. I much prefer the newer interface that was introduced with Windows Vista and need the option to use more than 4GB of RAM. For that and other reasons, I run Windows Server 2008 x64 on my home machine. I have also run Vista on a great number of different machines with varying levels of success. Overall, for individual use, Vista can be a good choice, but beware of mass rollouts.
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Either way you look at it Microsoft Data Center management did not follow standards or best practices in this failure. In which case it makes me wonder more about the outsourcing of corporate data much less personal data.
- mburton325
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What's your take?
How do you feel about Vista? Windows 7? Are you going to make the jump when Windows 7 is released?NOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!! Really bad idea! I hate Microsoft did things are wrong! Stay on Windows XP!Skip Vista and Windows 7 and wait for Windows XP SE2 (Secondary Edition 2) can support Directx 10 or higher and compilable with old games to working on XP SE2 like Directx 9.0c and older. Bring all old memories back to relive again on Windows XP SE2!
Forget Vista and 7! No thanks! Finally Microsoft is SPAMMER and making money for doing stupid!!!
I am biggest fans of Windows XP right now. All games running very wonderful on Windows XP. How you feel about old games will not working on Windows 7? I would be angry! Grrrrrr!
wow
Guest86, I love how you attack microsoft and then recommend one of their products at the same time. Windows Vista is an incredibly advanced product containing a huge amount of new features that make the desktop more usable and reliable. Yet it had bad compatibility issues throughout the lifespan. Consider windows 2000.After four service packs the O/S is finally stable and somewhat reliable, but frankly XP blows it out of the water. Vista and Windows 7 fall under the same model. Vista was revolutionary and windows 7 polishes the O/S.